An Attention-Enhanced End-to-End Discriminative Network With Multiscale Feature Learning for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

The discriminative ability of image features plays a decisive role in content-based remote sensing image retrieval (CBRSIR). However, the widely-used convolutional neural networks cannot focus on the discriminative features of important scenes, resulting in unsatisfactory retrieval performance in complex contexts. In this article, an attention-enhanced end-to-end discriminative network with multiscale learning for CBRSIR is proposed to solve this issue. First, a multiscale dilated convolution module is embedded into some of ResNet50’s residual blocks to increase the perceptual field and capture the multiscale features of remote sensing image scenes. Then, a lightweight and efficient triplet attention module is added behind each residual block to capture the salient features of remote sensing images and establish the interdimensional dependencies using residual transform. In addition, the end-to-end training approach is performed using an online label smoothing loss to reduce the intraclass variance of features and enhance interclass differentiability. Experimental results on four publicly available remote sensing image datasets show that our network achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance, especially on complex scene dataset UCMD with an average retrieval precision improvement of 3.23% to 29.35% compared to other new methods.